Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [288]
The planet’s basal chill. She shuddered in it, and set off west, walking in the rover’s tracks so she couldn’t be followed. The sun was cutting through the mist. Snow was falling again, tinted pink in shafts of sunlight. She trudged along until she came on a little drumlin ridge, with its steep side clear of snow. She could traverse along the bare rock without leaving tracks. She did so until she got tired. It was really cold out, the snow falling straight down in tiny flakes, probably accreted around sand grains. At the end of the drumlin was a fat low boulder. She sat in its lee. She turned off her walker’s heating unit, and covered the blinking alarm light on her wristpad with a clump of snow.
It got colder fast. The sky was an opaque gray now, tinged with faint pink. Snow fell out of the pinkness onto her faceplate.
She had just stopped shivering, and was getting comfortably chill, when a boot kicked her hard in the helmet, and she was dragged up to her knees with her head ringing. A suited figure banged its faceplate into hers, hard. Then hands with a vise’s grip took her by the shoulders and flung her down to the ground. “Hey,” she cried weakly. She was yanked by her shoulders to her feet, and her left arm was pulled back and held up high behind her back. Her assailant worked at her wristpad, and then shoved her painfully forward, her arm still held high. She couldn’t fall without breaking her arm. She could feel the diamond pattern of her suit’s heating elements begin to flare against her skin, burning their pattern into her. Every few steps she was slapped hard in the helmet.
The figure marched her right back to their own rover, which astonished her. She was shoved into the lock, and the figure tumbled in after her, and closed and pumped the chamber, and tore off her helmet, and then his, and to her utter amazement it was her Simon, purple-faced and shouting at her, striking her still, his face soaking wet with tears— this her Simon, the quiet one, now yelling at her, “Why? Why? Damn you, you always do this, it’s always just you you you, off in your own world, you are so selfish!” Voice rising to a final painful shriek, her Simon who never said anything, never raised his voice, never spoke more than a word, now striking her and shrieking in her face, literally spitting, gasping with fury; and suddenly it made her mad. Why not before, why not when she had needed someone with some life in him? Why had it taken this to rouse him? She punched him right in the chest, hard, and he fell back. “Leave me alone,” she shouted. “Leave me alone!” And then the anguish shuddered through her, the chilled shiver of Martian death: “Why didn’t you leave me alone?”
He regained his balance, lunged forward and seized her by both shoulders, shook her. She had never noticed how powerful his hands were. “Because,” he shouted, and paused to lick his lips and catch his breath—”Because—” And his eyes bugged out, and his face darkened even further, as if a thousand sentences had all jammed in his throat at once, this her mild Simon!— and then he gave up on saying it, and roared, and shook her in his arms, shouting “Because! Because! Because!”
2
Snow fell. Though it was early morning, it was dim. Wind whipped across the chaos, swirling the spindrift over the shattered land. Boulders as big as city blocks lay jumbled against each other, and the landscape was broken in a million little cliffs, holes, mesas, ridges, peaks— also many peculiar spikes and towers and balancing rocks, held in place by kami alone. All the steep or vertical stone in this chaotic terrain was still black, white flatter areas were now white with snow, so that the landscape was a densely variegated black and white, all swirling in and out of visibility as billows and veils of snow gusted by.
Then the snow stopped. The wind died. The black verticals and white horizontals gave the world a definition it didn’t usually have. In the overcast there were